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Topic: A question regarding color palettes (Read 863 times)

Hey there, so I couldn't figure out a place to put this question, so if this is the wrong place, please forgive me.

so I have been looking for means to ripping color palettes from an SNES rom, but my search has not given me any results. The thing is, I am a pixel artist whom would like to fiddle around with a certain color palette, but I am not sure if ripping specific color palettes are even possible. I have considered doing this the hard way and just take colors from screen shots, however that would take me forever, and I would like to know if its even possible to do this an easier way before I even go into this.

Once again, I am not even sure if this is a proper place for this kind of question, but if anyone could answer this question, it would be rom hackers.

Don't take them from screen shots and instead take them from palette viewers on emulators, or use savestates to feed to tile editors which often have the ability to rip them (and even export to windows palette format). Not sure about the current favoured ones here but http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/112/ should have something.

Obviously you need to be at a point in the game where such things are displayed (cheats, existing savestates and such are good here, if you want to learn a bit of light hacking and cheat making it can accelerate this more**), possibly even on screen*.

*Some games will load things up way ahead of time, others will need to almost have the thing on screen before all the relevant data is there. If it is on screen though then it has to be there.

**classic example being you go to a shop and buy a basic sword or something. Do a search, buy another sword, another search... until you find out where the sword is in inventory. Most games will have a what the item is and a how much you have. The what the item is thing usually goes in order so with a bit of fiddling you can then make an inventory cheat and get the needs 99 hours of grinding (and a lot of luck) end game hidden sword to rip. Some games you might be able to do this with locations (rooms in some discussions, levels in others. Figure out either the room number in RAM or where the door (which tends to function like a teleporter) leads to and bam hidden end boss) or enemies themselves in battle/an area. The latter two concepts in particular break the game completely so cheat makers don't tend to create them but they are useful here. Alternatively if there is some hidden/key item you can hopefully generate those into your inventory/key item screen and get to end stages quicker still.

This is good for ripping things for whatever general purposes, if you are going to stick them back in the game afterwards then you might have to do something more hacking related. Step one is again rip from the palette viewer but instead use that data to search the ROM -- nobody really gains anything for compressing such things and palette driven animation/dynamic palettes was not as popular a concept back in the 16 bit era as it got later on the GBA and DS so things are usually untouched between RAM and the ROM itself. If you can find it then you can edit it.

I started playing around a bit with vSNES, the savestate editor. It does have a nice palette viewer. Can't recall if you can rip palette info, but Nightcrawler's review of it does reference capability to edit.

In vSNES, open the .zst savestate you just made. When the program says something like “Cartridge not found.” just hit “Ignore”. Go to the “options” menu by clicking on the gear thing near the top right corner. Then go to “PalViewer”. In the “palette format” box select “JASC: 3349 bytes, 8-bit, text (PSP, Animation Shop, Microangelo)”.

In the PalViewer window, click the floppy disk icon to save to a palette file. You should be able to use the file generated in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9.